My recent video on Azure File Sync. Derived from the customer ready deck.

FAQs:

• Do we have any GA dates?
  • Can tell customers Azure File Sync GA will end of April, beginning of May
• Any restrictions on using/testing in Australia during preview.
  • only 5TB Azure File Shares – 100TB Azure File Shares on the roadmap
  • no cross region cloud endpoint sync until GA
  • No backup to recovery vault for long term retention – this is on the roadmap
    • currently Azure File Sync uses Azure Files snapshots, one snapshot daily to a maximum of 200 snapshots
    • Azure Files snapshots allow for granular file/folder restore
  • only available in selected regions
    • Australia East included
  • Cloud Tiering is not supported for server endpoints which point to Windows system volumes e.g. C:\ drive
  • Cloud Tiering is not compatible with dedupe. The team are working on dedupe interoperability
  • Azure File Sync doesn’t support mapped network drives, only locally attached storage
  • Cloud Tiering policies coming
  • AAD auth for Azure Files coming soon
• What do we know about costs?
  • $7 per server, one server free per storage sync service. During preview this is priced at a 50% discount
    • Here is the Azure Files Pricing page, scroll down the bottom to see the File Sync Prices
    • The total cost of Azure File Sync (AFS) services is determined by the number of servers that connect to the cloud endpoint (Azure File Share) plus the underlying costs of File storage (including storage & access costs (Transactions)) and outbound data transfer (egress) and Azure Backup as incurred.
• Does it need an on-prem file server upgrade?
  • No, you could potentially replace on-prem file servers with cheaper commodity servers, as the service provides the redundancy, high availability, backup and disaster recovery.